You Want to Challenge Me to a Duel?

"Whoa—this shape—"

The old men crouched together over the crude sketch Chen Ruiping had just drawn on the ground, studying it and muttering among themselves. One of them ventured a guess.

"There are signs of petrification, and this oval pattern... especially this part in the middle. It looks rather like a snake's eye—"

The old gentleman kept changing angles as he examined the pattern on the ground: multiple concentric rings surrounding a twisted core that resembled a whirlpool, or perhaps an abstract eye. At last, he sighed.

"You've heard that Western legend, haven't you? Medusa's eyes—the ones that turn anyone who sees them to stone—"

No one answered, but every heart skipped a beat.

Especially with the statues moved over from the "protective excavation" nearby for comparison. Now that they looked, the ominous gray-white surface, capable of "freezing" a living creature on the spot, really did resemble the petrification of legend.

Meanwhile, Little Chen, who had only recently been hauled up and given a quick cleaning and bandaging, had somehow wandered back to the edge of the pit. Someone held him firmly back, leaving him unable to climb down. With the brass sword wrapped haphazardly in rags and leather on his back, he craned his neck to peer below, his eyes shining like a mouse that had found a new toy.

"I'm fine. Really, I'm fine. Just a few scratches. They won't slow me down—"

A Sword Cultivator needed a hard sword and an even harder mouth!!!

Despite being wrapped in bandages from head to toe, he still couldn't stop his bloodstained lips from moving. "Man, that big thing packs a punch—"

As the first to discover the clue and the first to see the pattern on the palm, the young man smacked his lips, paying no attention to the